VICAR'S LETTER
17
Sundon Road
Streatley
May, 2009
Dear
All
Our
guide through Holy Week and Easter this year has been St John.
We have followed in his footsteps as he discovered a series of
correspondences between the Creation story in Genesis and the
events of the life, death and resurrection of Jesus.
These correspondences shaped his understanding of who Jesus was,
what he had come for, how he brought it about and where it would all lead.
The
first correspondence John detected was between God’s first act in
Creation and the miracles of Jesus. The creation story opens with a clear sequence of events.
There is chaos. God speaks: ‘Let there be light.’ Light bursts into the cosmos bringing order and life.
Exactly the same sequence occurs in every miracle of Jesus.
There is chaos caused by illness, disability, sin or death.
Jesus speaks. Light
flows into the chaos of darkness bringing healing, rehabilitation,
forgiveness and life. This
correspondence leads John to recognise that in and through Jesus the voice
that once spoke at the creation is speaking again in the world.
Jesus has come to inaugurate a new phase of creation
God’s
second act in the Creation story is to separate the light from the
darkness. John observes that
Jesus does the same. He comes
as the light of the world, but that light serves to separate the light
from the darkness. The good
are drawn to the light, but the bad shrink from it for fear that they will
be exposed. This second
correspondence helped John to understand how the new phase of creation
would be carried through. The
light of Christ, shining in his words, shining in his deeds, and shining
most brightly from the cross would draw out all that was best in the world
and individuals till it became the shaping power in their lives and in the
life of the world.
The
third correspondence that John discovered lay in the ending of the two
stories/events. The story of
creation ends with Adam and Eve walking forward together into the Garden
of Eden, at one with God, at one with each other, at one with the rest of
creation. The goal of the new
creation is to transform into reality the harmony imagined in Genesis.
It will reach its completion when Jesus’ great prayer is
fulfilled:
“Father,
may they all be one. As thou,
Father, art in me
and I in thee, so also may they be in us.”
There
have been a lot of celebrations recently of the work of Charles Darwin,
and rightly so. He offers a
remarkable analysis of the way the world has been organised up to now.
But it cannot carry on that way.
As Richard Dawkins puts it in his book The
Selfish Gene:
“Be
warned that if you wish, as I do, to build a society in which individuals
co-operate generously and unselfishly towards a common good, you can
expect little help from biological nature.
Let us try to teach generosity and altruism, because we are born
selfish. Let us understand
what our selfish genes are up to, because we may then at least have the
chance to upset their designs, something that no other species has ever
aspired to do.”
Christianity does not have quite such a gloomy view of humanity as Mr Dawkins. It affirms that there is something of God in all of us. As St John puts it, “All that came to be was alive with his life.” But it does recognise with him that there has got to be a change in the way things operate. If the world is to have a future, selfish competition and the survival of the fittest have got to give way to selfless co-operation and conservation. We may see the coming of Jesus as God intervening to set in motion such a new direction for Creation.
All best wishes,
Roger